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Mom was and is my heart. It was Mom who hung the poster over my bed that read, “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” It was also Mom who painted the peace sign on my cheek and proudly walked me through antiwar marches in Central Park. Naturally, I didn’t get the political implications, but I loved the excitement of the crowd singing “Give Peace a Chance.” I felt like I was in the midst of an important moment. I felt protected by the goodness that radiated from Mom without her even having to try.
Her first form of protection was to make sure I knew who and where I was, in the most physical sense. To do that, she taught me my very first song. It had a sweet melody. I sang, “Leonard Albert Kravitz is my name. And I live at 5 East Eighty-Second Street in New York City. And I live at three-sixty-eight Throop Avenue with Grandma in Brooklyn.”
Looking back, the song has more depth than I realized. In it lives the two-sided nature of my childhood. Twin worlds, twin identities. I was happy in both. Both formed me. I’m not sure how or why I could so easily slip in and out of starkly diverse cultures and yet remain confident in my own skin, but I could. I believe this intense adaptability gave me the freedom to be happy anywhere. Half a century later, I am still grateful.
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Let me paint the picture for you.
In Manhattan, our apartment at 5 East Eighty-Second Street was on the third floor of a once-grand five-story home chopped up into a dozen modest units. In the sixties you could still find affordable housing on the now-exclusive Upper East Side. Our building, modeled on turn-of-the-century Parisian Beaux-Arts architecture, was a monument to faded glory: wrought iron decorated glass doors, carved cherubs, and an ornate lobby set off by a sweeping marble staircase with a tiny European elevator.
Set in the back of the building, our compact apartment looked out onto brick walls. No view. The living room had a small dining area and a spinet piano. There were shelves filled with jazz records and books like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Sammy Davis Jr.’s Yes I Can!. Off to the side was a sliver of a galley kitchen. There was also a pullout couch where my parents slept. They gave me the only bedroom. That made me feel special. It also allowed Mom and Dad to give parties that wouldn’t interfere with my sleep. My parents had a huge network of fascinating friends whom they loved entertaining at our place. My room was filled with all the stuff little boys like: Hot Wheels, model planes, Frankenstein and the Wolfman figurines, and, best of all, a plastic record player.
Football legend Joe Namath lived across the street—sometimes he’d throw a ball around with us kids—and only a few steps away, at the end of our block, stood the mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art, like a fortress commanding the eastern border of Central Park.
Although our place was small, most of the kids in the neighborhood lived in enormous apartments. It was a world of privilege.
In contrast to all that, I didn’t see much privilege in Brooklyn. Mom’s parents lived across the East River in mostly Black Bedford-Stuyvesant. My early life was a dance between the two boroughs. I felt I belonged in both places—and the truth is, I did.
My education began at a nursery school in Brooklyn called Junior Academy. So, all week long, I’d stay with Mom’s parents, who owned a three-story home at the corner of Throop Avenue and Kosciuszko Street, in the heart of Bed-Stuy. On Friday afternoons, my parents would pick me up in their VW Bug and drive me back to Manhattan for the weekend.
My life in Brooklyn was grounded by two phenomenal human beings, my maternal grandparents, Albert and Bessie Roker. They showered me, their only grandchild, with love. Born on the small, remote island of Inagua in the Bahamas, Grandpa was forced to become the man of the house at age nine, when his father died and left four children to the care of his ailing wife. Grandpa didn’t have electricity or ice until his teens. Eventually he made his way to Miami, where Georgia-born southern belle Bessie was working in an ice-cream parlor. They fell in love, married, and migrated north to New York in search of a better life. The world has never seen a harder worker than Albert Roker. Doing four jobs at once, Grandpa was a house painter, doorman, handyman, and manual laborer at a factory where he wound up as foreman. He always spent less than he earned and managed his money with an eye toward his family’s well-being and his daughter’s education.
Grandpa used to talk about a vision that came to him as a kid: when he grew up, he’d never refuse anything his wife or child asked of him. The answer, he decided, would never be no. And it never was.
Albert loved learning. Completely self-educated, he knew the Bible; he quoted Shakespeare, Socrates, and Malcolm X. He devoured whole books in a single night. He was driven to improve his mind. He also did all he could to expose his daughter to important culture.
When my mother was thirteen, Grandpa took her to the theater to see Porgy and Bess, where they were forced to sit in the section “For Colored Only.” Despite the irony—a musical featuring Black performers performed to an audience where Blacks were given second-class treatment—the production triggered my mother’s interest in theater. Her father’s prudent management of money put her through Howard University.
On Sunday mornings, Grandpa dressed me in a suit and tie, and off we went in his Cadillac to Lincoln Center, where, at Avery Fisher Hall, Dr. Ervin Seale presided at the nondenominational Church of the Truth. In his sermons, Dr. Seale praised the great teachers and prophets Buddha, Jesus, and Moses. Grandpa read all Dr. Seale’s books, whose titles (Ten Words That Will Change Your Life and Success Is You) reflected his code of self-improvement as spiritual evolution. Though this compass was not exactly the same as mine would become, his sermons were an introduction to these concepts and an invitation to start forming my own connection to the unknown.
For all my father’s powers and passions, devotion to God was not one. Grandpa was my guiding light for all that and more. He was also surrogate father to dozens of neighborhood boys. He took the kids bowling, drove them to the countryside to play golf, and got them tickets to museums and Broadway plays. He made sure they had library cards; he showed them how to apply to trade school and college. Grandpa saw life as an opportunity for self-improvement at every turn. The great thing about him, though, was that he didn’t see it as an opportunity for just himself, but for everyone—especially kids who lacked resources. Grandpa became that resource for an entire neighborhood.
He was also a disciplinarian, but with a style much different from Dad’s. If I was mischievous, Grandpa sat me down and, like a psychologist, explained how my bad behavior was hurting me more than anyone else. He droned on and on and on. He wanted me to understand why I’d done what I’d done, so that I could identify the problem and resolve it. The whole process was agonizing. I would have preferred a beating. But thank God he had insight and patience. His approach was invaluable.
Grandpa had a Bahamian Sidney Poitier–style accent; Grandma spoke with a slight Georgia drawl and attended a Methodist church. If he was intellect, she was soul. My grandmother was the love of my life. A full-bodied woman who loved her southern-fried cooking, Bessie possessed a God-given ability to read people right. When Grandpa went off on a philosophical rant, she’d look at him as if to say, “Albert, please!”